Am I killing my flash drive? (PortableApps)

[lifeisbetterwithketchup]

I have been consistently using my flash drive with PortableFirefox all the time for a few months now. I noticed that whenever I'm opening/closing tabs, sometimes my flash drive is reading/writing. I assume this is caches of some sort. My question is: am I killing my flash drive with all these constant read/write cycles (aka noticeably shortening the life of it)?

[marshallh]

Yes - but slowly enough that you'll probably lose the flash drive before it's ever a problem. All modern drives have some sort of wear leveling that spreads out writes to different flash blocks, even then you have tens of thousands of erase/write cycles before you will have any problems.

[lifeisbetterwithketchup]

Yes - but slowly enough that you'll probably lose the flash drive before it's ever a problem. All modern drives have some sort of wear leveling that spreads out writes to different flash blocks, even then you have tens of thousands of erase/write cycles before you will have any problems.

Thanks for clearing that up for me.

[vskid]

Make sure that you have the cache and history disabled, those will cause more reads/writes. I believe theres other ways to stop reads/writes at the PortableApps site.

[Sparkfist]

Most flash ram has a 300,000 rewrite to each cell before it's dead. So yes it might die after something like months later with the kind of use you're putting on it. However think of it this way, with how cheap thumb drives are you should have to worry too much. Microcenter has just offered an 8GB drive for $30, so don't sweat it if it does die.

If you are sweating it though, and the drive has the option. Set it to read-only. that will prevent firefox from even trying to write anything to the drive, and you'll have something that could last years.